subtle chiropractic

Learning to Love Life

Dr. Amanda Love 1 Comment

LEARNING TO LOVE LIFE 

Logic is not the answer

This life is not always a walk in the park.  In fact much of the time there is challenge, hard work and lots of arduous learning to be had.  Sure there are rhythms when things flow smoothly and all goes according to our desired plan, yet there are many rhythms when things don’t.  Rhythms where we feel lost, confused, bored, restless, stressed, and where we are ready to be off planet in some peaceful paradise where things work easily and we feel good all of the time.  Yet the fact remains that we are here on this planet, with this physical human body and there are things to be learned, shared and created right here where we are.  How do we make peace with being where we are even when we don’t like it?  How do we live in acceptance rather than resistance to our experience of challenge, work and learning?

When things are difficult many of us are good at logically rationalizing the situation.  For example say you are experiencing a tough rhythm.  Something you really want isn’t working out.  You feel confused and lost as to what is going on in your life.  You keep trying to think and find a logistical way out of the situation or something that will make it work out, but you are just spinning.  You can’t seem to find your way through.  You feel stuck, and little hopeless.  This is an incredibly common scenario.  You might logically know that somehow everything is going to be just fine, and while you logically know this you can’t quite seem to get yourself to really believe it because you are still spinning inside of it all.  Utilizing logic is not the solution at this stage of the game.

While logic is not the solution, this doesn’t stop us from trying to use it in order to get out of whatever it is we don’t want to experience in this life.  The reason why logic is not the answer is because from our mind’s perspective it is illogical to accept what we don’t like or understand, and ultimately acceptance is the solution to learning to love life as it is.  Your logic will likely not get you into acceptance of whatever is, but rather will keep you continuing to strategize how to not accept whatever is showing up in your life that you don’t want or understand.  Accepting what is also means that we have to feel what is.  This is again why we default to logic.  Most people prefer being tortured inside of the tornado of their thoughts rather than feel their emotions about what is.   

LOVING WHERE YOU ARE 

Accepting what is

Feeling our emotion about what is, bridges the gap between what we are logically trying to get ourselves to figure out and accepting what is.  When we feel emotion it clears out our resistances.  We stop trying to fight an uphill battle and therefore we can take a breath.  We may still not like, prefer or want what is, but we are no longer trying to deny, escape or get out of its existence.  We are rather just with what is, no longer fleeing from the dangers of feeling our emotions about it.  We’ve felt the thing, or more accurately we’ve felt our emotions about the thing.  We now experience some space, some ease and some peace.  We may not have clarity or know what we need to do, because perhaps there is nothing to do, or maybe there is, but either way we are more embracing of being in this moment rather than trying to get out of it and into the next one where we perceive we will feel more peace, joy or excitement.  

How does all of this lead to loving where you are?  When you are more accepting you are naturally more loving of everything.  You can still not like certain things, but your liking or not of what is, doesn’t touch you loving it.  Yes that’s right you can love what is, and simultaneously not like it.  You can respond with authenticity and grace, receiving what you don’t like and loving it exactly as it is.  But as long as you are in resistance to what is and not feeling your emotions about it, your mind can’t grok how this would be even possible.  Acceptance of what is opens the doorway in your mind so that you can comprehend this.  

Until we reach acceptance of what is no real change can occur in us or in how we perceive or feel about the situations of our life.  Instead we will just keep trying to fight or flee from it.  We won’t find love where we are if we are resisting what’s here.  You can’t escape your resistances.  You will take them with you into your next situation, and your next one, and the one after that, and on and on for eternity.  They don’t just go away because you insulate yourself from them through carefully crafting or controlling your environments.  Rather you only keep them at bay while they lurk in the depths waiting for their next opportunity to present themselves so that you can heal, resolve, and integrate them rather than move away from them.  

To not love where you are in this moment is to reject life and be in a state of unappreciation, and there is nothing more painful than that.  If your circumstances or situations change to your liking and then you decide to love life, your love is conditional.  The condition of your love being that your preferences are met.  This is not the stable, unshakeable, unconditional, divine love that we all seek to know.  To know this love is to become it.  How bold is to love life even when it’s not up to your liking?  How brave do you need to be in order to feel, accept and love life as it is and know that it will work out perfectly for you even if you don’t like it? This is what takes in order to learn to love life and to love where you are in this moment.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Your Impact on the Field

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YOUR IMPACT ON THE FIELD 

Tuning your awareness

We tend to think that the world inside of our heads lives only there. What we internally focus on or pay attention to in our minds, we think affects only ourselves, if even that.  We don’t really realize the impact of our awareness on the field, space or environment all around.  Often our experience is that our thoughts are simply random passing flickers and we really don’t get the power that we have in how and what we pay attention too.  Due to this, many of us are not disciplined in utilizing the power of our minds and therefore we don’t feel that we are very powerful.  The thing is that regardless if you are aware of the power of your mind or not, you still have one, and you are consciously or unconsciously using it to focus in certain ways.  The way in which you focus is affecting you, the field you perceive around you, and arguably the expanse of the entire universe.  

The field is the interconnected web of which you cannot not be a part of, even if you don’t want to be.  Many might think of it as the empty space in between things, but it is much more than that.  Even though you can’t see the field with your physical eyes, it is densely packed with energy and information.  The energy and information that the field contains is made up of awareness or consciousness.  What that means is that the source of energy and information that makes up the field is you, as you are awareness.  You are the awareness that is aware of your body and of all the things you perceive in your environment.  You are not the objects or forms, but rather the awareness of the objects and forms.  Having this basic understanding of the field can help you see how you have direct impact on the field, as your awareness makes up the field.  

Why is this important?  It’s important for many reasons.  One of those reasons is that in recognizing that you impact the field you can begin to be more conscious of that impact and even utilize it.  The result of this is that you create an experience of life that is more in alignment with your desires and you feel more powerful in your ability to work with life.  You perceive the happenings of life to be less random and become more intentional and participatory with manifestation.  When I say manifestation I simply mean the physical, tangible world of experience.  One of the reasons that physical manifestation sometimes seems to not match our inner state of preference or desire is because we lack coherence with the whole.  Another reason is that we are not consciously aware of where we are manifesting from, meaning we are unconscious and undisciplined in the power of using our minds.   

BECOMING MORE AWAKE 

Bringing more magic to life

The more you realize your impact on the field, the more self-responsible you must become to your own state of being and how you use your focus.  This is the process of becoming more awake.  Being more awake doesn’t mean that you are more aware of spiritual concepts than your neighbors, family members or the average joe.  Or that you attend more spiritual workshops, read more books, or do more ceremonies than other people.  Rather being more awake means you are more accountable to your inner state and your impact on the field.  It’s a bit more practical and a little less woo then some people might prefer.  It’s not about someone or something saving you from your experience, but rather you bringing to your experience what you want it to be.  

The waking up process can be perceived as perhaps less magical and require more work than we would like it too.  After all being accountable to our state of being is not something we are really taught early on.  Rather we learn that our state of being is dependent on our life looking, feeling or being a certain way.   This is why we keep recreating the same experiences over and over and why it sometimes feels like nothing is changing and we aren’t growing, both individually or collectively.  When we don’t deliberately choose our state of being and focus, then life just seems to be happening on it’s own, and in a way it is.  We aren’t awake or conscious enough of ourselves to run the show, so the show just runs.  If we want to watch a new program, or have a different experience of life, then we must get up and change the station.  Getting up and changing the station is the equivalent to shifting what or how you use your focus.

Often as spiritual seekers we are attempting to bring some kind of levity, light, bliss, joy and ease into our experience and the world.   Yet we often fail to see how we aren’t bringing that.  We are caught in our feelings and sensations of heaviness, darkness, confusion and hard work, and genuinely don’t know why we aren’t experiencing butterflies and sunshine everyday.  This isn’t about denying or spiritually bypassing what we are feeling, but rather feeling what we are feeling, accepting it, and then choosing what we truly desire.  This is often hard to do.  It requires energy.  It requires changing our mind’s focus.  It requires that we care about ourselves and our experience of life.  

Your impact on the field is a real thing.  How you show up, what you choose to focus on, and where you place your awareness will determine your experience.  Beyond that it will also either enliven or drain the field, it will either add life or take life out it.  You can move mountains if you learn to discipline your focus.  You can do things that appear to be magic.  You can bring actual magic into your everyday experience for yourself and others in a very real and practical way.  You stop creating separation between your spiritually preferred reality and the ordinary reality that we seem to be living in.  There is no difference.  The forms of our ordinary reality will shift and change in response to the information they receive from the field, from you, from your awareness.  Learning to discipline your attention and focus might possibly be the most important thing you can do for yourself and others. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Living Fear Free

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LIVING FEAR FREE 

A life without threat

Consider fear for a moment.  Perhaps you don’t think of yourself as a “fearful” person.  Maybe you feel that you only experience fear occasionally in moments when it’s called for or justified.  Fear is a sneaky little gremlin.  It is disguised as anxiousness, avoidance, tension, being non-confrontational, or trying to fix situations, yourself or other people’s experience of life.  It can manifest as sensations in the body such as digestive upset, headaches, muscular aches and pains, jaw clenching, gripping, inflexibility, tightness, trouble sleeping, difficulty relaxing and more.  Fear is the basic response we have to feeling a sense of powerlessness or like things are out of our control.  When fear is present our lower brain centers are activated and our higher, more conscious brain areas are not being utilized.  Self-survival and preservation is the name of the game.  We can only think about how we will get through the next few moments or minutes, and have little capacity to zoom out and see the big picture.

I would venture to say the fear is somewhere in the background of our experience most of the time even if we aren’t aware of its presence.  It can easily be called up into the forefront when we perceive a threatening situation, thought, emotion or sensation.  Evaluate for a moment the contrasting experience.  What percentage of the time, while you are awake, do you feel completely at peace with nothing to fix, nowhere to go, nothing to get done, no urgency, no tension in your body or mind, and non-reactive without a single disruptive thought?  All without utilizing any substances to be in this state.  

Because a peaceful inner state of being is desirable for most people, and because most people don’t experience that, we often turn to substances, foods or medications to numb out the fearful feelings and sensations, so that for a few moments of our day we can feel relaxed.  Due to our reliance on things that we ingest to shift our state of being, we might not even know what we are feeling.  This is true for many.  We are so disconnected from our fearful feeling state of being because we do our best to numb it down as much as possible.  While this is an ok short-term strategy, this is not a way to live.  Yet this is the way that most are living.  Kind numb, kind of checked out and just going through the motions of life and getting all the things done.  We think life is “ok”, but deep inside we know its really not that great and we aren’t sure how to be any other way.   

WANTING PEACE 

Fantasy or reality

Imagine for a moment what it would feel like to never feel or perceive threat again.  To be invincible in the yourself and in the knowing that nothing can harm or hurt you.  That nothing at all is out to get you.  That absolutely everything is working for you.  That every sensation, feeling and thought is there to support you somehow.  To be absolutely empowered.  This is a far stretch for most.  In fact many people likely think that this is an improbable state of being and living.  Yet what if it is our next evolutionary step?  The next rung on the ladder of our development.  To be completely fear free and live openly and invitingly with all of our experience of life.  It may seem like fantastical thinking, yet to me it feels more like waking up from the nightmare that our mind has created about our experience, and experiencing more of the actual reality that is.

How do we get there?  It’s simpler than you might think.  It requires only a few things.  First is the overarching desire to live in a peaceful state of being no matter what.  This desire must be strong.  I mean really, really strong.  If you don’t have an unshakeable desire for peace than you will be easily disturbed, because let’s face it life and most of our current perspectives about life, give us a lot to be disturbed by.  Your desire is the hope you have in overcoming your environment, the stories you currently have about your environment, and the fuel you need to make the changes in your life for inner peace.  The second thing required is the willingness to feel all the “bad”, uncomfortable or non-peaceful things you attempt to avoid feeling by numbing, controlling, tensing up, people pleasing and the like.  If you aren’t willing to face your underlying feelings than you will forever be running from them and paradoxically then they will run you.  Whatever we avoid rules and chooses for us.  We are not in charge when we are not feeling all of our feelings head on.

You can see it’s really not complicated.  It does however mean that you will need to do some things differently.  You are going to have to change some of your habits, preferences or addictions to certain substances or activities that check you out from feeling.  You may need to slow yourself down so that you can be more subtle in your awareness of yourself and pay attention to what you are feeling.  If you are someone who is always with other people you may need to prioritize some alone time so you can self-reflect.  None of these things are hard, but they require change.  When we don’t really want to change something, then it feels hard to change, but when our desire for something is strong, the change is easy.  That’s why I said that your desire must be strong or else the journey will feel treacherous to you and you will perceive obstacles that seem impossible for you to overcome.

It is possible, and even probable if you so desire, to live fear free.  To be an open channel of peace, love and presence.  To be a rested, still, stable presence in a world of nonstop activity.  This is not an impossible feat.  In fact I believe it is our next collective developmental step in consciousness.  To come back to wholeness and to heal, is to unify with all that is.  If we perceive threat we will keep some parts separate, which keeps us separate.  To drop our guards and be brave enough to feel all the things, will return us into remembrance of the one unified whole of which we are. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Effortless Stream of Giving

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EFFORTLESS STREAM OF GIVING 

Giving to life

Giving often feels like effort.  In fact most of us feel like we are giving all day long and find ourselves completely drained by the days end.  Giving can come with activity, busyness and action, and there is no doubt that activity without periods of rest can deplete our systems.  Yet there is a giving to life that happens even before action or activity occurs.  A state of being of giving that is prior to anything that we physically or mentally do.  In fact I’d suffice to say that much of our tiredness and depletion comes not from the activities themselves, but rather from not being in a state of giving while we go about doing our activities.  Again it’s not to deny that we need both periods of activity and rest, however the place from which we come from makes all the difference.

So how do we find this effortless stream of giving?  The good news is that we don’t have to go anywhere to find it because it lives right inside of us.  We only need to tap into it so to speak.  You’ve probably tapped into it before, but you likely didn’t know exactly what you were touching.  You might have related the experience of tapping into the effortless stream of giving as feeling defeat.  In fact the feeling of defeat is an entry point into the effortless stream of giving.  Yet most people get lost in their story about what is happening and keep trying to make their experience match their desire rather than feel defeat.  They keep banging away at attempting to make the appearance different rather than admitting defeat to the appearance.  Hence why they get so damn tired.  Hence why we are all so damn tired.  

When you stop trying to make the operations and happenings of life be different, there is no other choice but to let them be.  When you let them be as they are and participate with them as such, you stop forcing anything.  When forcing stops, so does resistance, tiredness and efforting.  If you’re constantly fighting the stream you are going to be expending a lot more energy and it’s going to feel like a lot more work than if you just went with it.  However going with the stream will at times feel like defeat and you must be willing to feel this defeat.  The beautiful thing about this, if you really get this, is that when you accept defeat you naturally open into giving.  You can’t not give to your experience when you are no longer fighting it.  When you allow what is to be how and what it is, you become the stream of giving organically.  There is nothing extra that you need to do.  It’s simply how it is when you are with life rather than at odds with it.  You may still not like your experience, but you won’t be as tired and the need to check yourself out of life so that you can rest and recover will be less.  You will start to find and feel rest inside of your experience, and here is where you are actually present, maybe for the first time ever. 

STOP WISHING INTENSITY AWAY 

Opportunities for being present

Sometimes life has to kind of beat us up a little bit before we are willing to accept defeat, so that we ultimately learn to live presently in full participation with the unfolding of life.  When we are experiencing this “beating up” of sorts we often label it under the disguise of the word “intensity.”  You’ve probably heard someone or maybe even yourself say, “wow things are really intense right now.”  It’s a very popular spiritual thing to say.  I hear that phrase many times a week.  When people say this often they are wanting that experience of intensity to go away,.  They are internally waiting, though they might not know they are waiting, until appearances and circumstances change so that they can feel lighter, better or less intensity.  The energy of this inner dynamic feels like wanting whatever is happening to just be over with already, because once it’s over you think you feel better.  Once the intensity is gone then you think you will be able to relax.

This is a trap.  It’s a trap because life is full of intensity and if you are waiting or trying to force the situations of intensity to go away, you will find yourself doing this until the day your body dies, and maybe even beyond, who knows.  Besides for it being a trap, when you wish your intensities to go away you rob yourself of incredibly potent opportunities for learning, which I call catalyst.  This catalyst, or these moments of extra intensity, bring the gift of breaking us down.  Why do we need to be broken down you ask?  Bluntly stated because most of us are living in arrogant, self-centered ways and seeing through limited perspectives that have nothing to do with what is actually occurring.  Most of these perspectives harm us or others rather than being helpful, yet they can be very convincing that they are trying to help.  These sneaky arrogant, self-centered ways along with their limited perspectives need to be dismantled so that we can stop acting in opposition to the unfolding of life and rather move with it.

The little bit tricky thing about all of this is that we typically greatly identify with these parts and perspectives that need to be dismantled, so we tend to not let them go out without a fight.  Hence the way of effort, force, resistance, which eventually results in tiredness and depletion that we may then lead to sickness, illness or adrenal fatigue.  This then brings us to the dire need for intensity in our lives, because often intensity is our only hope in dismantling these ways of being and limited perspectives once and for all.  Stopping wishing your intensities away.  See them rather as an opportunity to open into the effortless stream of giving.  

Breaking isn’t bad.  What’s breaking is energetic architecture that isn’t serving us living fully present.  Those structures need to break.  If they don’t we stay trapped and wonder why our experience of life doesn’t change for the better.  Even though many of us try to not feel the break of anything, breaking is natural.  The journey of growth is deconstruction and reconstruction.  If you aren’t regularly destructing then you probably aren’t growing much either.  Don’t try to always make things “good”, let things be “bad” or intense at times.  Even celebrate intensity if you can because within it is immense opportunity for something great to be born. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Life Beyond Consumption

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LIFE BEYOND CONSUMPTION 

Our love of consuming

Being a consumer of life is the natural way of living for most people.  We love shopping and get excited when we have a package waiting for us at our front door.  We look forward to going to our favorite restaurants in order to eat and drink all of things that we enjoy.  We can’t wait to watch or read that new movie or book we’ve been waiting for to come out.  Scrolling our preferred social media apps to see what’s going on with our friends or in the world around us in one of our most preferred activities.  We are nearly constantly taking something in.  Whether that something is food, information, or tangible objects, we tend to like the feeling of things coming in.  In fact for many people this is how they relax.  In contrast, when it seems like life wants or demands something from us, even if we are the one creating that want or demand, we feel tense, vigilant or like we need to perform or show up in some extra alert way.  Sometimes just thinking about what we will have to give makes us tired.  

In a lot of ways consuming is easier.  We just sit back and let life in.  It doesn’t require any real effort on our part, except for perhaps deciding if we want to buy the shoes we like in brown or black, or choosing if we want to go with the fish or steak dinner at our favorite restaurant.  It’s low demand, not that complicated and in the end we feel some kind of satiation.  Our new outfit arrives, we get loaded up on information from our new book, or we get the latest news about our “friends” on social media, and we feel full.  Why does getting full feel so good?  It feels good because most people operate from a belief in scarcity and therefore any attempt to give feels like fuller depletion.  At least when they get they can momentarily not feel lack.  

Yes there is the obvious fact that we need to food to survive, albeit much less than most of us would like to think we need.  We also need clothes, but probably not near as many as we buy.  Information is helpful to make informed decisions about things we don’t know about it, but many of us are addicted to consuming information without taking any real action on the things we learn.  Social media can provide us with some sense of connection with others, but most people are just mindlessly scrolling to see if they are missing out on anything.  While most people probably wouldn’t fully admit it, they just want life to happen to them without them having to do much work.  This means that rather than creating we would prefer it be given to or have things done for us.  An example of this would be if someone gave you the option to either work your way to $1 million dollars or be given $1 million dollars, nearly everyone would opt for the later.   Case in point, most of us would prefer to receive support and care rather than give it. 

WORKING, CREATING & GIVING 

Stopping the consumption cycle

Giving is work.  It does require something from us, namely our time, energy, and focus, which are, our most precious of resources.  Because they are our most precious resources, we tend to want to conserve them, not use them up or give them away too readily less we run out of them.  But what are we really saving them for?  Do we think that if we don’t use them then we can store them up?  Are we afraid if we give our attention to one thing then we won’t have the energy, time or focus to give to another thing?  Perhaps you are ambivalent about what we want to give too.  Maybe you have difficulty making a decision about what is important to you.  Perhaps you just feel like you don’t have enough time, energy or focus and are living in scarcity about your state of inner resourcefulness.  We are always plotting in our mind what we think we have the inner resources for and therefore how willing we are to show up to life.  I am not denying that rest is important, it is, however most of us are way underestimating and underutilizing our capacities.  Why?  Because we think our inner resources are going to run out.  

I could tell you that there is no such thing as time, that it is simply a made up construct, but it’s likely that you will keep operating as if there is time.  I could tell you that you are the source of energy itself, but you will probably continue to feel like you don’t have enough of it.  I could tell you that you’ve got nothing but focus, yet you will claim that you get easily distracted.  These ways of thinking and believing are just habit.  In some ways you know that timelessness, infinite energy and inexhaustible focus are true, yet they aren’t true for your experience of life, at least not yet.  If you really embodied that there is a surplus of energy, no time and that you could focus on whatever you wanted to for however long you wanted too, what wouldn’t you do?  I imagine that your relationship to work, giving and creating would be mighty different.  I would think you would stop living by the clock in your head, your stories of limited energy and your distractible focus. 

Consuming is not the only way to live.  It’s not negative to consume.  We all need to consume some.  We need food, rest, nourishment, information, education, and social connection.  However when we are coming from scarcity of our inner resources of time, energy, and focus, with the fear that they might run out, then our consumption levels increase.  Sometimes to the point where we never feel satiated no matter how much we take in.  To remedy this we need to clearly know when we are full and stop consuming.  At that point rather than taking in more we need to switch to giving through work or creation.  That is the natural cycle of giving and receiving.  

Some people might say that they don’t know when they are full because they have overridden their fullness levels for so long.  If that is you I recommend this, when it stops feeling good and begins to feel bad, or like an addiction or obsession, or you find yourself becoming less present or more checked out, you know you’ve reached the fullness point.  So rather than watching another movie, reading another book, eating another piece of chocolate, having another drink or scrolling another social media app, stop in that moment and find a way to give, work or create instead.  This is when you move beyond a life of consumption.  The secret is that this is where energy, focus and timelessness live.  Never again will you fear them running out because you are living inside of them.

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Ending Urgency

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ENDING URGENCY 

There is nowhere better to get

Everyone in the world seems to be in a mad dash to get things done or be somewhere other than where they are.  We drive fast, think fast, move fast, send text messages fast, eat fast… fast, fast, fast.  Always onto the next thing and never being inside of what is now.  We have some kind of belief that somewhere else is better, more fun, more exciting, more relaxing, or more peaceful than where we are now.  If we could just get to those moments or times when everything looks and feels better and lock them in for eternity, then we could stop with all the urgency and just be.  Yet even when those transitory moments of peace or better come, we can’t seem to stop, slow down and enjoy the moment.  We only recognize that this moment will change and be gone soon enough.  

How do we ever live relaxed and in a state of “be”ing with the near constant change, activity and movement of life?  How do we stop trying to get somewhere and rather be where we are in each and every moment?  One of the most fundamental beliefs that we must work with in ourselves is the one that says that something is better than now.  How many times throughout your day do you find yourself engaged in an activity just hoping to get is over and done with?  Perhaps you feel this way during your morning workout, or when you are at work and things don’t seem to going as you want them too.  Maybe you can’t get something to work right on the computer, or you have a class at school you don’t enjoy, or an annoying neighbor, roommate or some other person you have to deal with.  When we find ourselves in these types of situations we mostly just want to be out.  For it to be done and over with because we do not feel pleasant, relaxed or at peace.  We think once this activity, task, conversation or situation is over then we can relax and be.  

The thing is life is loaded with movement, and might I even say what seems to feel like chaos, stickiness or mess.  There is simply a lot of stuff going on that never seems to stop and things are rarely perfectly packaged and placed as we would like them to be.  So what’s the answer here?  How do we bring what we want to experience to every situation that we find ourselves in?  Attempting to manipulate each and every experience, circumstance and/or person in our life (including ourselves) is exhausting, and quite frankly impossible, even though this is what most people try to do.  The answer rather is that we must pause our sense of urgency, of wanting to get out of our experience of “ick” or overwhelm, and drop into it rather than try to get out of it.  By moving into our experience the possibility to transform ourselves inside of it becomes available.  When we transform ourselves we transform our experience of whatever it is we are experiencing.   

LIFE’S PACING 

Surrendering beyond ourselves

Have you ever noticed that life seems to have its own pacing?  It operates at a speed or rhythm that sometimes aligns with our own and at other times not so much.  Sometimes the pace of life feels too fast and at other times too slow.  We may find ourselves feeling urgent in either scenario.  If the pace of life feels like it’s moving too fast then we try to speed ourselves us to meet that pace and the demands of all of the movement of life.  If the pace of life is too slow for us then again we try to speed ourselves up hoping that life will respond to us and speed up as well.  Either way we are gearing ourselves up for the race to somewhere else.  

Life’s pacing is largely out of our control.  There is a bigger orchestration at play to which we are mostly unaware.  Sure there might be things that you can do such as putting more or less activities into your day to day schedule, which you may actually need to do, but the bigger message here is in how you walk with life and it’s pace.  Not getting ahead of it or behind it, but rather being right with it as it unfolds.  What this requires is a surrender to the rhythm that is present rather than the rhythm we would prefer to be present.  While this might seem bold to say here it is: our preferences matter, but not that much.  While we are the kings and queens of our own world inside of our own heads, when it comes to the larger orchestration of life, we are part of the whole.  Often we don’t see from the whole, but only from the part we play.   In this way we are egocentric, not in a negative way, as it’s mostly innocent on our part.  Rather in a way in which we just simply don’t see the bigger picture.  We are not inside the heads of every single being in this universe seeing from the perspective of universal consciousness, therefore our scope and sight is limited to our own.  This creates immense confusion and frustration for us as we often don’t understand the what’s and why’s to the pacing and timing of things.  

Accepting confusion is one of the best ways to come back into rhythm with life’s pacing.  Understanding is not required for us to have acceptance.  In fact this is one of the great lessons of having this human experience.  Not necessarily an easy lesson, yet it does the job of eventually getting us into a state of surrender.  Surrendering to what is rather than what we prefer to be.  Only once we move into acceptance and surrender can we begin to see beyond ourselves and our egocentric human point of view.  We are in the unknown of what the moment is, contains and could be, rather than in our ideas, preferences or insistences about what is occurring.  

There is so much about the happenings that we don’t get to decide, even the happenings of our own bodies.  What we do get to decide is how we be, and whether or not we try to get out or be in rhythm with the moment.  When you feel urgency arise inside of you begin the practice of pausing.  Take a breath and let go of whatever you are energetically holding onto or trying to get done, and allow the state of “be”ing to be present inside of your experience.  Recognize that you can both be and engage in activity.  There is nothing to get over with, as there will always be more things.  Rather see the moment that you desire is now.  What you wish to experience is now.  Bring that to your experience and watch the magic reveal itself to you.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Breaking Up with Shame

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BREAKING UP WITH SHAME 

Exposing our hidden selves

Shame, which is an underlying sense that we ourselves are somehow bad or wrong, is a well grooved inner pathway for most.  Some people might first default to blame, which is simply shame projected outwards onto others.  Why do we carry around with us this sense that we are, or could be, bad or wrong?  Why is it that when other people disagree with how we are, or have opinions about how we should be, that we nearly immediately go into self-defense in the form of hatred or rejection of ourselves?  Shame is one of the most pervasive and debilitating feeling states.  When we feel it we tend to freeze, withdraw and judge ourselves.  We think thoughts along the lines of “if only I could be better or different than I am, then I wouldn’t be deficient, or bad or wrong, and people would love and include me.”  Talk about one of the most painful states of being in which there seems to be no good way out.  From the perspective of shame the only answer is for you to be different or better than you are in order to be loved and accepted.  This is battle that you will always end up losing.  You will lose because your sense of being loved and included is outside of you, and you will forever be chasing it because being loved and included is the most primary of all human needs and wants.  

We have endless strategies to avoid feeling shame.  One of the most primary ones is to stay hidden, to not allow others to see who we are, to put up fronts and be inauthentic so that people won’t judge us.  If we don’t let people see us then they can’t reject us or tell us that we are wrong.  If there is no one “real” at home inside of us for people to see then we can’t be accountable to being “wrong”.  If we just stay quiet enough, keep the peace, pretend to not know much including knowing who we are or what value we have to contribute or share, then we can avoid the painstaking judgment of others.  That is until we can’t.  There will be a time when someone judges us, when they disagree with us, when they perceive some kind of insufficiency in our actions or beingness.  There is no hiding then.  The cloak is off and we are exposed.  This is when the shame gets in.  We might react in anger, recoil in self-defense, or completely cut ourselves off from our own heart.  We are left with the feeling that we are bad and wrong, and often beating ourselves up about it or lashing out at others.  

You might be wondering where does shame come from.  It’s simple really.  It comes from a belief that you are bad or wrong.  Where did the belief come from?  The belief in badness or wrongness is such a pervasive societal belief that you would be hard pressed not to have pick it up somewhere along your human journey.  Maybe someone told you were bad or wrong when you were growing up.  Perhaps you learned it socially through peers groups, in school, or in your family.  It’s actually not so important where you picked up the belief, rather what is important is that you identify the belief living inside of yourself.  That you see it and recognize that you are now the source of it.  You are the one that keeps that belief alive, active, and true for you in your own psyche. 

NEVER BEEN WRONG 

Graceful learning

What if you’ve never ever been wrong?  Seems like a bold question, eh?  Would you believe it if I told you that you never have been?  For a moment you might feel some relief at that thought, but most people will go on to validate for themselves how it’s not true.  They will conjure up all of the times they’ve been bad or wrong in the past.  They will reinforce the belief in their wrongness or badness for themselves.  Most people don’t really want to believe that they are right and good.  When I speak about right and wrong as it relates to us as beings, I am not talking about detailed or factual information.  Yes you can be inaccurate about facts, or in recalling certain details, or about information.  What I am pointing to rather is who you are, including the things that you do and say.  If someone is frequently found to be insisting on their rightness by needing to be right about facts and information it’s often because they feel deeply wrong inside as to who they are.  It’s simply another shame avoidance strategy.  

Imagine for a minute if you could really embrace non-badness and non-wrongness.  If that could really be a reality for you.  How would you feel?  For most I would imagine that you would feel some sense of freedom.  It would be the end of self-doubt, the end of self-hatred and the beginning of an availability to life that you might have never experienced before.  See most of what we believe to be bad/good or wrong/right is based on what other people think or what culture/society says we should be like.  It’s not based on our own knowing.  If it was we would all just be being ourselves and wouldn’t think twice about it.  But almost no one is being fully and authentically who they are all of the time.  

Let’s talk about actions and things we say.  First of all people who love themselves and know that they are right and good don’t harm other people.  There simply isn’t motivation for it.  Doing harm to others is an outward expression that comes from a deep sense of self-hatred and self-rejection (i.e. shame).  Believe it or not, and it’s of course up to you to choose for yourself, but there are no actions or words that are bad or wrong.  Yikes.  You might disagree and you are more than welcome too, however the shame cycle never ends for you then.  You perceive some action or word as wrong in another.  You project that wrongness onto that person who now feels shame from your projection regarding their words or actions.  In response they act in some distorted fashion in order to not feel the shame.  Same goes for your own words and actions. What we perceive and feel we create.  The cycle continues unchecked into infinity.  

So then what about learning?  How do we learn if we don’t feel shame?  How do we up level and become more refined, loving and aware creatures towards ourselves and others?  Well again believe it or not, we don’t have to be bad or wrong in order to learn, and learning doesn’t mean that we are/were bad or wrong.  People can give their opinion to us, of something we did or shared, without us going into shame.  We can both stay open to the feedback and then decide what we want to do with that information.  Is there something constructive that we could learn from that person’s information without going into wrongness?  Could we just receive that information and note it or integrate it.  Perhaps there is nothing bad or wrong about what we did or didn’t do, but only learning to be had.  Also what if when you shared your experience of others with them you simply shared impact rather than judgment.  What if you took accountability for how you feel about what occurred while still providing information to another person about how their words/behaviors impacted you.  This is a high level skill yet it is learnable.  

We are all constantly learning and it doesn’t mean we are bad or wrong.  When you get this you can break up with shame.  While at one stage of your development perhaps shame was a good learning strategy for you, it’s also one that at some point quits serving you.  It limits your growth and keeps you disconnected from yourself, which in turn helps and serves no one. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

More than Enough

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MORE THAN ENOUGH

Coping strategies to avoid

Feeling like we are not enough is the most pervasive of human wounds.  It is a cloak nearly all of us wear.  A deep sense of inadequacy, unworthiness, and unlovability.  Our biggest fear is that we are not lovable and that who we are is not valuable, and because of this we seek outside of ourselves for significance and love, thinking that it must be elsewhere.  That it must be something that we need to earn, achieve or somehow otherwise get.  This patterning, and our belief in our unlovability interferes more with the expression of ourselves than anything else does.  It is our biggest roadblock to fulfillment, health and well-being.  It stops us in our tracks, keeps us in our comfort zone, allows us to think small, live small and keep a certain distance from ourselves and others.

We have all learned strategies to cope or manage with the sense of fundamentally being not enough.  So much so that you might not even recognize the not enough story playing in the background of your psyche.  Some people learn to achieve, do and accomplish in order to not hear that voice of not enough.  Others learn to give as much as possible to others hoping that their not enoughness won’t be seen in the flurry of doing for others.  Other strategies include distracting ourselves with whatever we can find to distract ourselves with, leaving our body and living up in our heads or far away in the stars, creating or maintaining unaligned relationships, and/or distancing ourselves from life and others.  We all have utilized or are utilizing some or all of these strategies.  Without doing so life would be unimaginably hard.  Yet there is a cost to these strategies, which is that we never get to really just be or relax as ourselves.  

This keeps us exhausted and the fulfillment of the moment and the sweetness of life never seem to arrive.  It often feels like they are somewhere other than where we are.  If we can just keep up our strategies then we will get there.  We can see it on the horizon, even taste it, but it always seems like it’s just right out of our reach.  Never being able to surrender to and feel the not enoughness we keep at our strategies, convinced we will arrive in bliss, yet bliss can’t get in.  It can’t reach us or touch us because it is a completely different frequency than what we are currently constituting ourselves as (ie. not enough).  We can’t see how we are keeping all of it at bay.  We just believe that we are almost there while continuing to convince ourselves that there is somewhere else we can get too.  The thing is that there isn’t.  So that idea that we have in our mind stays just as that, an idea of fulfillment, bliss, and well-being that we continually chase and almost just touch, but never live. 

FINDING THE GIFT  

Being all that you are

Inside of every wound there is a gift.  In fact the entire spiritual journey is moving from wound into the gift of whatever the wound gives us.  It’s seeing how we couldn’t be who we are and share what we do without that wound.  However we can’t always just jump right into the gift from the wounded place.  There is learning involved (ie. transformation) before we can resolve, come to peace and give the gift that the wound gave us.  Even though most of us know conceptually that we are enough, many have not embodied it.  If they had we would be living in an incredibly self-empowered world, which we are not.  Rather we live constricted by our inner fears of expressing ourselves, of being not accepted by others, of not being able to make it, of not deserving, of being judged, cast out, separated, and of being left alone.  We feel these fears as limitations and often rather than noticing our deep story of inadequacy and unlovability we go into feeling like we don’t know how.  We think if we just knew the how or the what of our next step or steps then everything would be clear and we would feel better.

Not knowing how or what is our biggest “excuse”, if you will, to not move into our expression, power and worth.  It’s how we avoid, deny or escape the feelings of not enoughness.  The first step in any transformational process is courage.  That means courage to feel not enough rather than stuff it down or pretend that it’s not there (ie. spiritual bypassing).  Without acknowledging and feeling not enough we don’t have the energy, fuel or momentum to take new actions.  This is why we frequently feel like we don’t know how/what.  While it’s true that you may not know all of the details, when you face not enoughness head on you generate an inner power that knows how to figure it all out, even the stuff you currently don’t know.  

Often I hear people say that they don’t want to feel certain things, such as not enoughness, because they feel like they will never get out of them.  Like they will fall into a pit of despair from which there is no escape.  I find that the real pit of despair is avoidance of what we are feeling and/or staying in the story of what we are feeling, while not actually feeling what we feel.  The result of avoiding what we feel is that we experience stagnation, we feel stuck, we don’t grow, we continue to feel bound in limitation and never generate the energy we need to change.  While feeling things, like our sense of unworthiness or not enoughness, is not a picnic in the park, it will with time generate movement in your system.  You will start to see a pathway through.  You will begin to feel a hunger surge up inside of you.  You will take new action, think different thoughts, and see things in novel ways.  A power will rise up in you that says, “Enough of this!  I am enough! I do deserve! I do matter!”.  You become less and less afraid to express or be yourself.  You will discover the paradox of the simultaneity of relaxation and action.  

The gift in having the courage to face, feel and transform is that you give what you learn.  The world needs the gift of you.  No one else can be the specific frequency or flavor that you are.  Your flare is perfectly as it should be.  None is better or worse.  Moving that knowing from concept into embodiment is the missing link.  To surrender to who you are, just as you are, perceived inadequacies and all, everything included, is when you truly become a channel for all that you are here to be.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

Projections

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PROJECTIONS 

Giving & Receiving Projections

From the moment that we are born we are projected upon.  People tell us what we are.  Beautiful baby, happy baby, fussy child, wild toddler, shy girl, loud, quiet, kind, aggressive, daring, good girl, bad boy, doing it right, doing it wrong, withdrawn, social, not enough, achiever and on and on.  It really is nearly one nonstop lifelong projection.  One after the other.  Projection is so normal to us, both the giving and receiving of it, that we barely, if at all, notice it.  Even if you think you don’t experience projection, there is a good chance that you are simply oblivious to it because it is such an accepted way of being, living and experiencing life.  It’s literally unavoidable.  

Why is projection unavoidable?  Projection is a way that we learn.  We learn about our personality self and the world around us via projection.  There are both positive and negative effects to this.  For example if we receive projections from others that we are amazing and that we can do anything we want to in life, projection has a positive impact.  It moves us into our potential and empowers us in who we believe ourselves to be.  We feel seen and capable.  However if we receive projections from others that we are doing things wrong, we are too loud, shy, fussy, ugly or unlikeable, these projections move us further away from the truth of who we are.  This is why they feel so bad.  Anything that feels bad in terms of projection is something that is less true to who we actually are.  We miss being seen for our essence and rather receive information contrary to our natural state of being.  

In addition to receiving projections, we are also the source of it.  As our human nature would have it we are all full of agendas, assumptions and beliefs about what life is, who we are and how it all works.  We have ideas about what is right and wrong, good and bad, and a ginormous slew of other judgments to throw into the mix.  Even if you’ve done a lot of inner work on these things, still most of us have not cleared out assumptions and agendas completely.  This makes us projectors rather than clear mirrors for the people around us.  It’s important to take inventory of what it is you are projecting onto others and onto life in general.  One way to determine this is by noticing what emotions you feel most predominantly throughout your day.  Do you feel good, overjoyed, blissful, peaceful, or do you feel agitated, annoyed, impatient, worried, frustrated and ill at ease?  Whatever you project you also simultaneously experience.  Once you are more aware of what you project you can assess if that is what you want to be projecting.  Words have impact, but the vibrational quality from which we project is even more impactful.  

Whatever has been projected onto us throughout our life is what we tend to project onto others.  This is why you frequently see similar patterns or ways of being in family lines.  This is also why working with your lineage can generate healing and transform unhealthy projections so that they end with you.  Most of us don’t really know who we are, but rather think or believe the sum of the projections that we’ve received over the course of our life is who we are.  Particularly projections in our early life when we are more open, less discerning and more susceptible to environmental information; these tend to influence us the most.  You are none of the projections that you’ve ever received, even the good ones, but the ones that have felt good are closer to your essence.  

MIRRORING

Knowing who you actually are

Mirroring is really the only way we are truly seen in our essence, however in order to be a mirror, you must be without agenda or assumption.  You must also be able to remove all meanings and definitions that you’ve learned as your human self.  You could call this state of being as beyond ego, beyond self or beyond personality.  This is a pretty tall order, which is why it’s rare for us to ever meet or become a mirror.  Most find it challenging to empty out all of the meanings and definitions that they’ve spent a lifetime learning and creating.  The thing is though as soon as you define something, label it, give some kind of meaning to it, you no longer see the essence, but rather you only see your definition.  A bird isn’t a bird until you give it a label and make that label mean something.  A person isn’t good, bad, right, wrong, beautiful, ugly, loud, quiet, etc. until you’ve labelled them as such and then placed meaning on that quality.  

No quality can ever define you.  You are prior to all qualities.  You are the source from which all qualities arise.  You are the originator or origination of everything you experience and know.  However this is conceptual information for most people and not a direct knowing or experience.  The truth is that you’ve never experienced anything but this, meaning you’ve never experienced anything but essence.  It’s just that essence has been wrapped up, hidden, occluded, and veiled by all of your definitions and meanings that you’ve placed on top it.  All of the projections you’ve learned and taken on as your identity.  The definitions and meanings don’t ever change the essence, meaning they don’t change or touch the you that you actually are or anything else, but they do change how you see and what you experience.  This is tricky, but important to get.  

When you touch, taste or get a glimpse of pure essence it feels liberating, even if only for a split second.  You get to drop all of the false identities that have been projected on you over your entire life.  Identities such as not enough, loner, unlovable, mean/nice, aggressive/peaceful, good/bad, or happy/sad person, and for a moment you just are without any concept, idea or word defining you.  In that moment you know you.  The reason mirrors are helpful is because they know themselves as essence and as such can mirror that to others.  They can only mirror it because they know it.  Unless you are without your human filters, you will project through them and they will color what you see.  Those filters distort the image, not on purpose, but as an effect.  

If you put glasses on that have green colored lenses than everything you look at will be green, not because you are trying to make everything green, but as an effect of looking through those lenses.  You know everything is not green because you know that you have glasses on, and so it only appears that way.  This is how our beliefs, meanings, and definitions distort, color or interfere with us seeing what is actually there.  The only difference is that you likely don’t know what is filtering you, meaning you don’t know what glasses you have on.  You might have some ideas about your assumptions, judgments and meanings, but it’s not super clear.  The result of this is that rather than knowing that everything is not really green because you can see the glasses that you have on, you don’t know that what you are looking at isn’t what you think it is.  It doesn’t even dawn on you.  This is essentially being unconscious or not awake to ourselves, which most humans are not.  We don’t see our patterns, filters and beliefs and therefore don’t know reality from all of the delusions of meaning that we learned or made up.  Hence the need for doing the inner work to be more and more self-aware, more and more conscious, so that we can eventually see our filters, take them off and see ourselves.  This is the prime difference between a projector and a mirror.  A projector doesn’t yet know that he/she is wearing glasses and a mirror can see the glasses and take them off. 

The spiritual journey is the waking up of ourselves to ourselves so that we become transparent to all of our conditioning.  When we do we recognize ourselves as essence before any of the meanings and thus see that when we look out.  This is the end of projection and the birth of mirroring.  Some might say we finally see reality, our true self, love, or our primordial nature.  The name is not important.  The direct experience of it is.  

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado

INTENTION & FOCUS

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INTENTION & FOCUS 

A dash of magic

Intention guides life.  Life follows focus.  To some degree we all know this yet most of us aren’t really utilizing the power of it in our day to day life.  Rather we are often unfocused, scattered and distracted.  We decide for a moment or maybe two, that we want to feel a certain way, walk in a particular direction, or take hold of our state of being, but in the next moment we forget it.  We then wonder why we can’t seem to have the healing, life or state of being that we desire.  Then, on top of it all, we have a long list of impossibility beliefs to add into the mix.  If we muster up our will and utilize our focus, then this or that impossibility belief rears its head.  Feeling overwhelmed by it all, we stop in our tracks and give up.  We return to distraction because we can’t seem to find a way through.  We find ourselves feeling stuck, like we (or things) will never change and we feel resigned to life the way it is.  

I think the prime difference between people who feel like they are living aligned and those that struggle to stay aligned is harnessing the power of intention and focus, along with not being afraid of a little magical thinking.  If you’ve ever spent any time around a baby you know that they see the world through the lens of magic.  Something appears in front of their visual field and they get absolutely ecstatic.  They have no idea how it arrived or even what it is.  They are simply enamored and in a state of bliss by whatever it is they see.  They attempt to interact with it however they can, having no idea at all what to do with it.  This is what we call playing.  Then due to the fact that they have no label, definition or meaning, all they experience is magic.  Magic being the essence of the thing and not the thing itself.  As soon as we give names to things we no longer see the magic, and rather see only what we’ve decided something is.  All other possibilities flatten.  

The other thing to notice is that when babies are playing they are totally focused.  They quite dislike it when you remove their “object of magic”, which they are entirely engrossed in.  Their attention might move from toy to toy, but they are just as present with the next non-labelled, no meaning magical thing that arrives into their sensory experience.  As we become toddlers and begin to develop our analytical thinking mind we want to know what everything is and what it all means.  We start to get lost in the world of concepts rather than in the pure potential of what is.  Our minds learn to multi-task and focus on facts, details and the like.  We lose connection to the essence of things and begin to focus on the things themselves.   We move out of present moment and into thought.  

IMAGINATION & REALITY 

Increasing will

And well who doesn’t love thinking?  To just let your mind wander from this thing to that thing.  To be lost in thought.  To contemplate.  To imagine.  It’s fun to imagine, yet for many it stops here.  You might think that imagination is just imagination, not reality.  You may even be very good at imagining, yet if you don’t have any intention or focus behind your imaginations they remain formless.  This is not a problem, again it’s great fun to imagine in our minds, it’s only that you will not have a different human world life experience.  You will be living in thought or concept.  There will be a disconnection between your imaginal world (you could also say your desired world) and what you actually experience.  We are at a stage of human development, in this space-time nexus, where there is massive disconnection between our desired realities and the ones we are living in.  It doesn’t need to be that way, however it does take a heap of intentional focus in order to bridge the seeming gap.

Intentional focus might not be as hard as it seems, but it may appear to come at some sacrifice.  See when we align ourselves with our intention and focus we have to let all of the other stuff go.  That other stuff consists of a lot.  It includes, but is not limited to all of our divergent or distracting thoughts, all of our tendencies to avoid what we think can or can’t be, our habits of comfort, our low demand energy states, our pictures or ideas of what our intention is supposed to look, be or feel like. We have so so so so many ideas, and while ideas are great for imagining possibilities, they can also get in the way of letting the picture of it all reveal itself to you.  Our desires or imaginations are like the seeds, our intention and focus the water, and the sprouting flower just sprouts as it does.  We don’t get to decide it’s appearance.  We can guide and set conditions for it, but we can determine its expression.  We can only nurture it’s becoming and then let it be what it will be. 

If we are too fixated in our analytical mind then we will overly focus on the form of what is.  We will perceive disappointment if the form doesn’t match our desire.  If we return to our infant pre-mind state, we can see only the essence, the magic, the seed, the desire and then accept the form, the picture, the image that is the result.  This acceptance is very different than resignation.  Acceptance sees the beauty in the appearance regardless, where resignation sees only what is doesn’t want in the appearance.  The distinction is the seer (ie. you).  From where do you see?  

Harnessing the power of intention and focus is learning to increase your will.  To be determined without attachment.  This is the dance of will and surrender.  Coming from and with everything you’ve got and then with full embrace letting it be as it is.  Giving or aligning your whole self to your intention in any given moment is magic.  Essence is seen and the forms naturally reconfigure in response.  This is not a forceful or manipulative will, but rather a sacrificial will of sorts.  A will that will give away all of its petty distractions, impossibility beliefs and preconceived ideas for its true desire or intention.  A will that aligns behinds itself and that is self-generative.  A will that takes all of you, but of which you can find absolutely nothing better to give yourself too.  A will that eventually becomes much bigger than you.

Dr. Amanda Love, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado